


don't let your heart grow cold

by neverfadingrain



Series: hopeless wanderers [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, because even jim kirk's actions have consequences, don't worry it doesn't stick, more bastardized science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21894631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfadingrain/pseuds/neverfadingrain
Summary: “Two pills, every eight hours for the rest of your life,” Bones had told him worriedly. Pssh, like anything’s going to happen. He’s Jim fucking Kirk, of course he’s going to remember to take the pills he needs to survive.Or, Five Times Jim Kirk lost his magic life-sustaining pills and Bones flipped his shit.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Series: hopeless wanderers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1577167
Comments: 4
Kudos: 72





	don't let your heart grow cold

**Author's Note:**

> sooooo this little sequel has been in my WIP folder since probably the dawn of time? i dedicated my nano project this year to finishing up a bunch of old projects that just needed to stop living in my head already, because I’m tired of being haunted by the ghost of my potential. posting this for literally no one except the tiny part of my brain that is still, eternally, furiously screaming over how much sense into darkness didn’t make. 
> 
> unbeta’ed, technically, because there’s no point in editing these garbage ramblings.

**1.**

Jim wakes up dazed, dizzy, disoriented. It takes him a long moment to remember where he is and what he was doing last, and in the end it’s only because Bones’ face looms over him, scowling, that he realizes he’s in the medbay.

Again.

This is something like, what, twice in the past month? Bones must be so pissed at him.

“You complete idiot,” Bones hisses, visibly seething. “What part of _take your pills every eight goddamn hours_ did you not understand?”

“Wha?” Jim asks. He’s pretty sure he took his pills, has been taking them regularly for the past three months of shore leave while the Enterprise undergoes repairs and Star Fleet tries to get itself in some kind of order again—if only because Bones will call and nag him incessantly until he does—so he’s not quite sure what Bones is talking about.

Predictably, Bones reaches behind him for a hypo and jabs it into Jim’s neck. Roughly. _Ow._

“Last goddamn day of shore leave, and what? You—you couldn’t resist getting hammered one more time before we shipped out? What the hell happened, Jim? Why didn’t you take your pills?” Bones demands angrily.

Jim blinks, tries to think back to the bar. “I—there was a fight.”

“Of course,” Bones snorts.

“Some jackass got in my face, I was hitting on his girl.” The goofy grin on his face melts away when he sees the glare Bones levels at him. “I dunno, guess they rolled away in the fight. I didn’t realize they were missing, Bones, honest.”

Bones just shakes his head at him. “You’re so fucking lucky Uhura was there when you collapsed on the ground outside the bar, otherwise you’d be dead right now. Again.” He turns away for a long moment, and when Jim finally brings his eyes into focus he can see the light trembles running across Bones’ shoulders and down his back.

Clearly, this calls for a lightening of the situation.

“Naw, Bones,” he jokes, bringing his arms back behind his head lazily. “You’d have just brought me back again.”

Bones glares at him. This is, apparently, not the right approach to take. “Damnit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a necromancer!”

“So?”

“So _?_ ” Bones shouts. “ _So,_ you can’t expect me to bring you back every time you forget to take your goddamn pills! You can’t count on that, Jim, because _there is no guarantee!_ I shouldn’t have been able to revive you the first time!”

“But you did,” Jim asserts.

“I can’t—” Bones takes a deep breath, visibly tries to calm himself. “I can’t go through that again.”

Jim falls silent. There’s an odd look in Bones’ eyes, one that’s unfamiliar and wild and a little bit scary. Bones is serious. What he’s saying—whatever this feeling is—it’s real and bright and vibrant and Jim has no idea how to handle it.

“Seeing you on that table, Jim, that was the scariest moment of my life. Not when I lost Joanna, not when I lost everything in the divorce, _you_. I don’t want to go through that again.” Bones takes a deep breath, pulls himself back together, and stabs Jim in the neck with another hypo. “Take your goddamn pills, and get the hell out of my medbay. The bridge probably wants to know that they still have a captain.”

Jim slowly pulls himself upright, cautious about any lingering weariness or muscle fatigue. The last time he’d come back from the dead, his entire left side had been pins and needles for two days. But no, he’s fine, or mostly fine, and after seeing him walk across the medbay unaided Bones slams the doors shut behind him.

Sighing, Jim turns and heads in the direction of the bridge. There’s no reasoning with Bones when he’s in a mood like this—he’s better off letting his best friend calm down and coming back later with apology coffee, or something.

Bones will forgive him eventually. He always does.

**2.**

The medbay is dark when he swims back to consciousness, the only light coming from the lamp in Bones’ office. Jim groans, stretching his arms out and feeling an insistent achy soreness in every muscle. What the hell had happened? The last thing he remembers is arguing with some aboriginal shaman.

Bones appears out of his office at the noise, a familiar scowl painted on his face. “I should just keep you confined to quarters.”

“Bones!” Jim protests.

“At least that way I know you’ll be safe,” his best friend snaps back, and _oh_ _no_ , Jim thinks. Bones was scared again. “Do you even have any idea what happened this time?”

Warily, Jim shakes his head. He really doesn’t.

Bones’ glare grows in strength. “You seduced the daughter of the chieftan we were negotiating with, Jim! He caught you _in_ _her tent!_ ”

“Was she hot?” Jim asks distractedly, trying to think back. He can’t quite remember the girl—something about an especially strong brew that he might have consumed several mugs of, it was delicious—but he remembers her father, at least seven feet tall and absolutely covered in tribal tattoos. Very intimidating. Jim shudders.

“Not the point!” Bones snaps.

“Huh,” Jim muses, staring at the ceiling. “So I got beaten up by a guy over his daughter. Can’t say it’s the first time.”

Bones growls, reaches into a nearby cabinet and holds up a hypo threateningly. “Jim. Focus.”

“Focusing.”

“You nearly wrecked all the progress we’d made in the past two days! Just because you couldn’t keep it in your damn pants for one night. One night, Jim! I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure she was hot.”

_“Jim.”_

His best charming grin isn’t enough to negate Bones’ anger this time, so he hauls himself into a sitting position and swings his legs over the side of the biobed. “Bones. It’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, I’m assuming the treaty is fine. There’s no need to pull out the whole ‘I was worried for your life, Jim, you nearly died again, Jim’ shtick.”

“ _I was worried for your life, Jim, you nearly died again, Jim,”_ Bones snarls.

It’s a good snarl, Jim thinks absently, deep and intimidating and telling him so many things he wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. That’s why he tries to smile up at Bones again, relaxed and happy, stretching his arms out to either side. “But I feel _fiiiine_. Good work, as always.”

He hops off the biobed carefully, making Bones step back with the movement, and pretends he feels steadier on his feet than he is. There’s no need to make Bones worry more than he already is—or should be—and if he can get away without spending another night in the medbay it’ll be fantastic.

Bones looks grouchy, but it’s his usual manner of grouchy rather than the dangerous kind so Jim doesn’t think anything of it. Right up until the moment when Bones steps up again, plants his hands against Jim’s shoulders and shoves him back down onto the bed.

Jim, already shaky, lands on his back on the biobed with a soft _oomph._ “Bones!” he says, pretending to be scandalized.

Bones rolls his eyes. “You’re not getting out of here that easily, you idiot. Captains who lose their medication on peace-making missions have to spend the night in the medbay, you know this. And you know _I_ know this, which means you’re staying here tonight.”

“But I’m fine,” Jim says. He’s not whining. Or pouting. Or trying to endear Bones into letting him out early.

Not at all.

And, because he’s not doing any of these things, they have no effect on his best friend. Bones levels him with a fierce glare, stabs him in the neck with the hypo he’d been threatening earlier, and wanders back to his office. “Get some sleep, you’ve got a ship to run in the morning,” he tosses over his shoulder, and the grouchy dismissal is more familiar than it should be.

Bones stays with him all night, working tirelessly on his paperwork, and every time Jim startles himself out of a REM cycle the office light is on, the comforting grumble of a grouchy medic lulling him back to sleep. Jim tells himself it doesn’t matter, that Bones does this for all his patients, but it doesn’t stop the flush of happiness from crawling up his insides.

**3.**

“Uh, Bones?”

Jim really hates his life sometimes. Part of the time. Not a lot of the time. Mostly when shit like this happens.

“What.” is the flat response, grouchy and breathless.

“First, punctuation,” Jim pants out, pushing himself faster down the mountain and pretending they don’t have a horde of angry Romulans on their asses. “Second, just dropped my pills.”

“ _What!?!”_

Ah. There’s that punctuation he was looking for. It hurts to breathe, hurts more to laugh, but Jim does both before he responds. “Yup, over the ridge. Sorry.”

“God _damnit_ , Jim!”

“Hey, at least I’m telling you!” he defends himself. Seriously, this had better earn him some fantastic best friend points later. “Also, I still have half an hour before I’m due for a dose, so we should be good. You do have extras back on the ship, right?”

“Yes, I have extras back on the ship. What with how often you keep losing them, I kind of have to. I want you to live, after all, but that doesn’t mean those pills are easy to make, damnit,” Bones swears behind him, jumping over a fallen log and stumbling on the landing. There’s no time to stop and make sure he’s okay, though, because the Romulans are still screaming after them and Jim really wants to get back in transporter range.

He doesn’t even know how this had happened—they’d beamed down to conduct trade negotiations with the locals, who had insisted on sending them up the mountain with a selection of the best foods first, and the nearest Jim can figure is that they’d been worshipping the Romulans as some sort of gods, he has no idea why—but it all went downhill _very_ fast.

He means that literally.

Someone did actually go rolling down the hill.

Jim may have laughed.

The Romulans weren’t exactly glad to see them after that. It wasn’t that big a deal, because Bones wasn’t keen on meeting with Romulans in the first place, but there was shouting and angry threats were being made and it was just generally a situation filled with Not Good. So Jim made the executive decision to get the hell out of there—a decision that would’ve worked a lot better had the majority of the mountain not been under some kind of anti-transporter shield.

They really need to figure out a way to detect these things _before_ going inside. It would solve so many problems.

“Besides,” Bones grumbles under his breath, “I’ve been stocking up the past four months.”

“I’m not that bad,” Jim insists, adding in a petulant, “it was just once.”

“ _Twice,_ ” Bones corrects him.

“Semantics.”

Bones lets out a low growl of irritation. “You can’t keep doing this, Jim.”

Jim shrugs as best he can while running down a mountain. “It’s not like I plan for this to happen,” he says.

“Right, just like you don’t plan to seduce the alien princess or get attacked by Romulans or _piss off a bunch of superhumans who’ll kill you_. No, you’re the picture of innocence in all of this.” The ground levels off below them, a natural plateau on the mountainside, and Bones immediately reaches for his communicator. “McCoy to Enterprise!”

Silence.

Jim groans and keeps running. “Kirk to Enterprise!”

Static fizzles from the communicator.

Furious Romulan war cries echo behind them.

Then a voice, tinny and familiar. “Da, Keptin?”

“Chekov!” Jim gasps, breathless with relief. “Beam us up! Now!”

“Locking on,” Chekov says. “Hold still.”

Reluctantly, Jim and Bones come to a stop. Jim turns to look back up the mountain, watching the horde of Romulans charging down after them, and winces. “Any time now, Mr. Chekov.”

“One…more…moment,” Chekov insists, and then, “Energizing.”

Jim’s vision dissolves in streaks of rainbow-colored light, and when his eyes can focus again he’s standing on the transporter pad. Bones immediately wraps a firm hand around his upper arm and tugs him off the pad, grumbling under his breath and heading for the medbay stiffly.

“Thank you, Chekov!” Jim calls over his shoulder as he’s dragged unceremoniously out of the transporter room.

Chekov, curse the man, doesn’t even blink.

**4.**

“I can’t believe I’m doing this again.”

Jim blinks slowly, feeling like his entire body is floating two feet to his right. Everything is vaguely hazy, in that familiar way that tells Jim he’s doped up on the _good_ painkillers.

Damn, he must’ve gotten himself in some serious trouble this time.

“Bones?” he croaks.

Almost immediately, there’s a clatter of metal dropping onto metal and then Bones is looming over him, familiar craggy scowl firmly in place. “Jim!” Bones says, voice thick with relief.

If Jim hadn’t known the man since forever, he’d swear that Bones’ disgruntlement was genuine. But even as fuzzy as he is, he can instinctively tell that the scowl is covering for the fact that Bones wants to break down crying. With that awareness also comes the perception of the beeping vitals monitor behind his head, attached to the top of a biobed and shouting out his heartbeat for all to hear, and the dawning realization that he’s in a private hospital room instead of the Enterprise’s medbay.

Are they on Earth?

“Are we on Earth?” he asks hazily.

Bones turns away just long enough to pick something up off the table at his left hip. When he faces Jim again, he’s got a bioscanner in one hand and a holotablet in the other. “You know,” he says conversationally, which is a new and alarming change of tone for Jim’s grumpy CMO. “I thought it would be safe to leave you alone in Starfleet Headquarters. What’s the worst that can happen, I asked myself. He’s going to be stuck in boring meetings all day. There’s no possible way that _Jim Kirk_ can almost kill himself in _Starfleet Headquarters_.”

Jim winces. “Bones—”

“Do I just need to tattoo a reminder on your forehead?” Bones thunders.

“That wouldn’t actually—”

Thoroughly worked up now, Bones doesn’t even seem to hear him. “Because I’m not sure how else to get it through your thick skull that without these meds, there is no Jim Kirk. You _died_ , you asshole. You’re a walking medical marvel and you’re my best friend and my captain and I—we, we can’t keep almost losing you.”

“Aw, Bones, you do care,” Jim says, purposely deflecting. He doesn’t know if he can handle an existential conversation after being awake for all of five minutes.

Bones runs the bioscanner over his head and chest, movements jerky and stilted in his agitation. “Of course I care, you idiot,” he mutters.

Jim beams up at his best friend.

“You’re so high,” Bones says.

“Mmm,” Jim agrees. He bats at the bioscanner when it lingers too long on his forehead, itching uncomfortably. “

“Look, Jim,” Bones says, finally softening in the face of Jim’s obvious dopiness. He settles on the edge of Jim’s hospital bed, sighing, and runs a weary hand through his own hair. “Being dependent on medication sucks. Being constantly reminded of your own mortality sucks worse. It may not be something you’re used to dealing with, but you _have_ to make it more of a priority. As it stands right now, this isn’t something that’s going to go away.”

“It’s just a lot to deal with,” Jim mumbles to the starch pressed sheets below him. “Almost dying, and all that nonsense.”

Bones sighs at him. “You know I’m still doing research into the whole process, right? I’m trying to find a more permanent, long term solution, since you’re being a _giant baby_ about having to take a couple of tablets. And Starfleet is fairly invested in keeping one of their best captains around, remember? There’s talk of putting together a research panel now. We’ll figure something out.”

“I’m not worried about you figuring something out,” Jim confesses, words slurring together. The painkillers are making his tongue feel thicker and looser than normal. He relaxes back into the not-altogether-too-comfortable bed, now that it appears that Bones is done poking at him with medical implements. “You’re a genius, Bones.”

“Flattery won’t get you released sooner,” Bones warns him.

“Super Bones,” Jim says, giggling to himself.

Bones rolls his eyes. “Go back to sleep."

“Aye aye,” Jim says. So he does.

**5.**

“Okay, this time it _really_ wasn’t my fault,” Jim announces as soon as he walks into the medbay.

Bones, probably summoned by his tingling ‘Jim-Kirk-is-in-Trouble’ senses, sticks his head out of his office and flags down a passing nurse. The nurse nods, immediately changing course without a word to clear off a very familiar biobed at the far end of the room.

Bones keeps grumbling about how one day he’s going to get a Starfleet-sanctioned plaque engraved so he can dedicate the bed to Jim officially. Jim has already denied two requisition orders. He’s been paying more attention to his paperwork lately, in fear that another request will somehow slip by him and get accidentally approved. The crew don’t need even more tangible evidence of how much of a disaster mess their captain is—Jim provides enough visual and audio evidence on his own time.

“What wasn’t your fault this time, exactly?” Bones asks suspiciously.

Jim fails to disguise his wince, and slaps at Bones’ hands when the shorter man grabs his arm to haul him across the medbay. “Stop it, stop,” he says. “I’m fine, Bones, I can walk on my own.”

“Can you?” Bones snaps acerbically, thanking his nurse when she wheels over a medical cart with all of Bones’ preferred torture devices on it. He points at the bed. “Sit.”

Jim sits.

He sits patiently through Bones’ intensive medical exam, answers the doctor’s staggering array of health questions, and even Bones stick a biofeedback gel pad to his forehead.

Finally, Bones exhausts all of his options and rocks back on his heels, crossing his arms over his chest and scowling down at Jim. “Alright, what’s wrong with you,” he asks suspiciously.

“If you had _listened_ when I got here, I was trying to tell you,” Jim says.

“Uh huh,” Bones says. “All I heard was the beginning of yet another round of excuses.”

“Yeah, because it’s not my fault!”

“ _Jim_ ,” Bones says.

Jim rolls his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “So it’s…possible, that I lost my pills again.”

“You _WHAT_ ,” Bones says, very loudly.

“Yeah, I mean, I took a dose when I woke up this morning so I’ve still got five hours and I realized they were gone as soon as I got back to the ship, but I knew I couldn’t go back to get them so I decided to come see you right away like the responsible captain that I am,” Jim says quickly. He figures it’s probably in his best interest to get the whole explanation out before Bones has a chance to interrupt him.

Sure enough, Bones just stares at him until the datapad in his hand gives a relieved sounding bleep. “And _why,_ exactly, can’t you go back to get them?”

“Because I already snuck out while she was still asleep?” Jim says, half a question and half an explanation.

“You—” Bones starts, then pinches the bridge of his nose furiously. “You left them with your _one night stand?”_

“I didn’t _mean_ to,” Jim says reasonably. “And look, I’m turning myself in to face the consequences of my crime.”

Bones unsticks the gel electrode pad from Jim’s forehead and starts bundling away all of his various diagnostic tools. “I can’t believe you sometimes.” He turns away for a moment, organizing things on the medical cart so that it’s ready for the next patient who actually needs his life-saving skills. But Jim has known him for a long time—longer than either of them like to acknowledge, really—and he sees the defensive hunch to the doctor’s shoulders right away.

“Aw, Bones,” he says.

Bones, surprisingly, doesn’t reply.

Jim eases himself over to the edge of the biobed, swinging his legs down so that he can sit upright comfortably again. Now might not be the galaxy’s best time, he thinks, but they’ve been dancing around the subject for years now and the worst that can happen is Bones giving him the cold shoulder again. Or transferring to a different ship. Maybe. If Jim’s wrong, and Bones is offended enough.

Jim’s already on his fifth or sixth life, technically speaking. The chance of success is worth the risk, and he _still_ doesn’t believe in no-win scenarios.

“You know,” he says cautiously. Caution doesn’t come naturally to Jim Kirk, but for Bones he can learn. “I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving anything behind in _your_ room.”

“What,” Bones says. He looks at Jim over his shoulder, and the expression on his face is absolutely flabbergasted.

Gathering all the courage he has ever possessed in his entire life, Jim hops off of the edge of the biobed and turns Bones back to face him. “Bones,” he says seriously. “I like you.”

“What,” Bones says, still shocked beyond belief.

Jim rolls his eyes, feeling inexplicably full of fondness. “Please go get me another prescription, so that I can kiss you without you worrying about if I’m going to keel over or not.”

**(Bonus +1)**

“Hey Bones!” Jim says cheerfully as he settles into a seat across the table from him in the mess hall.

Bones swallows a bite of rematerialized mashed potatoes suspiciously. “Jim,” he says.

“Cheer up, why don’t you? We’re about to set off on a five-year mission into deep space! Uncharted territory! New planets and new peoples that no one in the known galaxy has ever seen before!” Jim digs into his lunch with gusto, practically vibrating with excitement.

He can’t believe that Starfleet is trusting the _Enterprise_ with such an important mission. The ship has undergone a serious overhaul in the year since that whole incident with Khan, and all of the test flights and easy missions Jim’s put up with have finally allowed the Starfleet Council to conclude that yes, the _Enterprise_ is ready for a long voyage.

Bones’ eye is starting to twitch dangerously. “Yay,” he says dryly.

“Come on, Bones, it’ll be fun!” Jim says.

His boyfriend hums noncommittally. “Oh yes, because the deepest darkest depths of _wild space_ are absolutely what I would consider ‘fun.’”

“We’ve got the best crew in the entirety of Starfleet, hands down,” Jim tells him seriously. “And now that the upgrades are finished, the best ship. Why don’t you look on the bright side, for once? If anything happens, you’ve got the latest and greatest equipment in your medbay so you can put everyone back to rights again.”

“Don’t forget the finite resources, and the fact that eventually we’re going to be dependent on what we can scavenge from these planets we’re discovering,” Bones says.

Jim blinks. Is that seriously what Bones is worried about? “Well, yeah, eventually. But that’s not going to be a worry until at _least_ four years in.”

“I’m still having to pull your ass out of the fire at least once a month,” Bones tells him seriously, stabbing into his reconstituted steak with vicious enthusiasm.

Jim grins. “That’s what boyfriends and best friends are _for,_ Bones.”

“And what about all the extra medication I’m going to have to synthesize?”

His grin widens, and Jim reaches into the pocket of his uniform pants. “Well, Bones, I have a surprise for you,” he says.

Bones stares at him suspiciously.

“Ta-da!” Jim says, and with a little flourish he pulls out a travel pill organizer. It’s got six little compartments, enough space to carry around two days’ worth of meds with him at all times.

Bones keeps staring.

“Well?” Jim says, putting the travel organizer down on the table in between them and resisting the urge to shift his weight nervously. He had thought it would be a nice gesture, something to help stop Bones from constantly worrying over his safety once they’re out of range of Starfleet’s hospitals. But maybe he was wrong.

“I’m offended,” Bones says finally.

“…what?”

“I’m _offended,_ Jim,” Bones says again, staring Jim dead in the eyes. “You finally taking an ounce of responsibility for your own life is alarmingly attractive, and we’re in the middle of the mess surrounded by crew that are going to be stuck working with both of us for the next five years.”

Jim smirks. “There’s an easy fix for that, you know,” he says, standing. He gathers his lunch from the table and gestures for Bones to follow him back to his quarters. 


End file.
